Eternal Bemusement
by Silvite Reign
Summary: [Persona 3] New Game Plus becomes canon. A look into the mind of a teenager who is forced to live the same year of his life over and over again to what seems like a very limited number of ends.
1. Introduction: Loop & Loop

I have seen this before.

The avatar of the goddess descends upon a gloomy, green-filtered world suspecting he will soon bring about its end. He is not the only one who believes this, of course. Everyone present believes it somewhere deep in their hearts, having buried those who hoped for it just to reach this point. But they likewise bury this belief, convincing themselves that they can stop this—they _must_ stop this.

As the avatar's form becomes clearer, he looks down at us, foolish creatures that we seem to be. He descends far enough to look in my eyes and sees something he doesn't expect: an utter absence of fear in me. He is taken aback by it for a moment, but only just. He probably passes it off as part of the "special" nature in me he has already sensed. If only he knew.

The rest is mechanical—patterns that merely have to be reacted to. The "miracle" that I perform is nothing of the sort; it's just another part of the story. I hold the World in my hand and feel as though nothing can stop me. If experience is telling, nothing will.

The World spins in my hand and, as though in some pretentious deeper-meaning act, I attempt to crush it as my reality whites out.

An alarm.

I don't need to open my eyes to know what I'll see: 04/06 06:30. I'm supposed to get an early start today since I didn't finish packing last night. Not that it will matter; the train I'm supposed to take will get delayed and I won't get to my destination until just after midnight tomorrow, where the mysterious boy will once again ask me to sign the contract making me responsible for my own actions.

I find that idea funny now. There was a period where I took to philosophy in hopes that I might gain revelation or comfort. I now wonder how responsible I can really be for anything. There are different choices I can make with respect to my life, sure, but the universe has chosen to limit my free will in such matters. I have tried again and again to not sign that contract, but to no avail. I have even signed it under a pseudonym in an attempt to invalidate it. Doing this merely rewrites reality. Suddenly my name becomes whatever I write down, even in my own mind.

And yet my identity remains the same. Everything is the same at this point. The deathly pale boy says "No one can escape time" without a hint of irony in his voice and disappears. The young brunette comes downstairs scared out of her wits, fearing that some secret about herself and this place have been inadvertently revealed. I still have the strap she gave me when she told me she loved me for the first time. She's done so for the first time three times now that I can remember.

I hope my emotionless account of these things doesn't suggest that I am without emotion about the subject. In a sense, I love her back. That love and the bond it created between us is the only explanation I have for why I am allowed to keep her memento. In another sense, she has not yet become the person I loved love. The girl that stands before me is a timid, immature version of that person, who will only be transformed as a result of an internal struggle in light of all the external hardship we will all be forced to undergo. In that sense, I cannot intervene.

In another sense, I can easily make it so that her love for me never comes about. She is also quite obviously not yet the person who confessed her love for me, and experience tells me that person may never exist at all.

I'm rambling now. There's no point in hammering this point any further; it's too obvious to warrant that. I do not know how many more times I will live this year through. I do not know the laws of the universe which allow it to be possible, or what laws have been broken to allow its possibility. The strong will which originally brought about the "miracle" has not been enough to break from this curse, and neither Death nor the hermit of the Velvet Room will divulge anything, even though I am sure the hermit knows something—his accursed "compendium" gives me enough proof for that. He merely repeats his mantra.

"The strength of your social links will determine your potential."


	2. Road of No Release

All philosophies are merely coping mechanisms—systems applied to reality for the sake of being consistent, even consistently inconsistent. This consistency is what allows us to act under the pretense that our actions have meaning in the world. Without this, context would be utterly absent from all we did. This is the true failure of absurdism, I think. It teaches us that if such consistency really exists, we can never know it, so we should just pretend it does exist (and exists in a certain way) to keep our sanity. This type of existence is hollow, however. Absurdists must convince themselves to act meaningfully in a world devoid of meaning. Without this approach, they are left with no task left but to rush to the end: death.

I have not been granted this choice. I do not intend to dwell on the physical hardships I face in this time loop, as they have become quite ordinary to me. I suspect that, should anyone find this account, they will be well informed of the actions of the Kirijo Group, which surely has thorough documentation on the nature of the Tartarus and the Dark Hour. If not, this will surely appear a work of fiction, and no amount of evidence presented here linking these events to well known occurrences will solidify this as any more than a work of existential science fiction. That doesn't matter to me too much; our thoughts are so limited by perspective anyway. Maybe such an apparently unbelievable tale will suffice to effect some change in the world.

Anyway, back to my point. Though I will not dwell on physical hardships, it should come as no surprise to an informed or imaginitive reader that death is all too easy to seek out in this world of mine. A direct method of suicide is forbidden for me, but a poorly executed rush into a powerful enemy is not. I have done this many times, accidentally and otherwise. When this happens, instead of dying, I am transported back to a random point in time before the battle. It can be anywhere from days to months (the one time I was transported back several months was particularly grueling). I suspect the amount of time is not random, but I confess to not know the mechanism behind it.

One might dream of the possibilities afforded by the ability to effectively erase moments from the past and replace them with new ones. This is where I struggle. A man whose name I cannot remember once said that once the unpredictable element of human nature is eradicated, human nature will cease to be human. I can personally attest that the same actions do indeed result in the same reactions. Every. Single. Time. I find no humanity in this. In popular culture, men are often taught that the love of a woman is something to be won, as though in a game. There are rules, skills, and experience that come out of playing this game. I used to abhor this approach, thinking that reducing human relationships to the same level as a game delegitimized it as a form of genuine interaction. That belief is quite different now. It is hard not to see the reactions of people as chemicals acting in response to certain stimuli. It is hard not to fall into the traps of determinism. It is hard to believe in free will, especially when I cannot seem to exercise it.

As I write this, there are cameras watching me, even though I am in (what should be) the privacy of my room. There are sensors in every wall designed to monitor certain fluctuations that will indicate to the owners of this building that I am exactly who they think I am. This is discomforting at best, though it is something I have grown used to. The only potentially sick mind here is Ikutsuki. Anyone else I just think of as getting a sneak peak of what's to come, depending on what my whims tell me to do this cycle (God, it's so nice to think that I actually can have any whims at all that I can follow through on). Conceited? Maybe. But I have received Yukari's strap three times now.

Though it will probably cause whoever reads this to seriously question my character, I feel I should include here a rather important series of gambles I have engaged in during (what I sometimes call) this Groundhog Year. It is important because it says quite a bit about the powers of manipulation and the rather limited scope of what we call humanity.

It took a few cycles before the idea occurred to me. Perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of impatience, I desired to know the outcome of the actions I was allegedly being held responsible for. I decided to attempt what might be called in euphemistic terms "secretive polygamy," meaning I attempted to date several women at the same time. At first I was always caught—dating people who all live within 30 meters of each other tends to be a good way to start rumors. But on my third attempt (note: I did not attempt this three cycles in a row, however I am finding that my boldness correlates positively with my jadedness) I started to notice how easy it was to hide things and explain away the things that I was not able to hide.

This experimentation has given me a strong impression of the only thing that I would present as a general rule of human nature: with the exception of the most pessimistic and jaded persons, people react very well when they are convinced that the things they want to be true actually are true. Seems obvious, doesn't it? But it is not to be underestimated. Manipulation exploits this rule constantly. It is terrifying how far a person can get by telling everyone else exactly what they want to hear, from the top of the ladder to underneath their clothing. And given enough trials and errors, anyone will find out exactly what any one person wants to hear most.

Make no mistake, reader. I am a social nightmare waiting to happen. Gekkokan has benefited greatly from my lack of psychopathy.


	3. Time What Is Time

Do you think me petty, reader? Though the context of my narrative is a year-long battle for the fate of the world, I have instead chosen to regal you with tales of high school manipulation. Would you prefer to hear about my adventures fighting the same enemies on the same floors of the same tower? Or perhaps you are looking for clues to fight Shadows yourself. In that case, I am giving you exactly what you seek, if the hermit's words are to be believed.

The only defense I can offer is that although I am apparently the hero who can save the world, I am still a teenager living a teenage life—that terrible time when all sorts of things have their importance overblown. There was definitely a time (back when I thought I could escape this loop by doing everything "right") when I cared far more about the Yukari's opinion of me than the fate of the world. High school does terrible things to a person.

Some may also criticize me for a comment I made earlier about charging into battle to bring about my own end. I should clarify that I undertook these charges alone each time. Even though at my most cynical I viewed the other members of SEES as simple manipulable input/output machines, I have never intentionally thrown their lives away. Perhaps the pain of watching a loved one die before your eyes is enough motivation to never do such a thing. In addition to this, however, I do not know the fates of the people who fight beside me after the loop resets. It is entirely possible that everyone else continues only to move forward in time and that I am the only one who is stuck.

Perhaps instead of stories of social engineering, you would be more entertained by my time loop theries? If nothing else perhaps you may laugh at them the same way some modern people do when they learn that some ancient people seriously believed the sun was pulled across the sky every day by a chariot. There is considerable metaphor and considerably little science in my theories. I've never been too interested in the physics involved, since there is surely no way to test my theories with a scientific method. Besides, if this ordeal turned out to be the work of a physicist, I would be very surprised.

Still, how does one evaluate the impact of one's actions in my state without asking the question of what impact they actually have, if any? The nature of the loop will surely be important to other inquiries in the future, anyway. I could draw you some diagrams, but that would be too easy. Surely it would also take away from the dialogue we've created. Don't you think so too?

Imagine, if you will, straight line that goes from left to right. Now highlight a segment of that line. That segment is your lifespan. More accurately, it is how someone might see you from outside of time: a long line with a small beginning and a frail or sudden end. Now imagine two points on that line. We all know how to go forward in time, or left to right along the line. But how do we go the other way? Specifically, of course, how am I going the other way?

My primary theory, the one that resonates most with my experience and lends itself best to the aforementioned metaphor, is that I am traveling straight back along the line. I feel as though I am marching through time with a bungee cord attached to my back. With great force and determination, I can stretch the cord a great amount. But I can only get so far, and the farther I get, the more violently I am pulled back. Of course, I have to go a certain distance before there is resistance (my first venture into Tartarus). In this scenario, unless I break the cord, my actions do not matter; there is a soft reset for most if not all of my actions since April 6.

But this is less than fully explanatory. What, then, if you curved outside the line to reach the reset point? Say, along an arc? Then you could bring things from the future back to the past. And if you can travel outside the line, need you take the same path twice, or can you break off at that point creating a vector? Do you need to travel in a straight line, or can you take many paths to the same destination? This could help explain why time appears to vary its pace at times. If the fourth dimension is sufficiently analogous to the first, then this also seems to explain certain things, such as my ability to retain certain items. But why are some items only preserved when I reach the end of the segment? If it were a true closed loop, then surely I could preserve them all. Unsurprisingly, questions simply beget questions.

I would take time now to explain why I believe my actions do matter if this second theory proves true, but perhaps time has appeared to slow for you after this dull exposition. Perhaps you are thinking that I do not write like a teenager. Rest assured, I am a teenager only in body; in mind I do not know how many years I have experienced, nor how many more I have left.

I guess in the latter case, I have retained some aspect of my humanity.


End file.
